Blogs from Helsinki, Uusimaa, Finland, Europe - page 29

Hey everyone, I know I missed writing last weekend, I was just so busy for the past couple weeks that I didn't have time to do much besides school. We had a deadline for our big project on Wednesday night. We all submitted a design and the professors will choose over the weekend which project will be chosen to be built at 1:1 scale by the whole group. The pavilion will on display at the Waino Aaltonen museum in Turku for several months starting May 24. We will find out on Monday whose design was chosen. Anyway, I have been busy doing that, designing a sauna, going on excursions, and doing reading and research. Last weekend I didn't get to do a lot of sightseeing but the weather was quite warm so I went for a ... read more

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So I'm still alive here in Finland! Had a busy weekend at the end of a busy week. Friday night I went out with some friends from school. We went to the 'cinema' to see Parfyymi. It was a German movie set in France with British actors speaking English and was subtitled in Finnish and Swedish. After that we went out for a few drinks. It was an interesting group: A pakistani, a swiss, a croatian, a swede, a dutch, a finn, a canadian, and a few others whose nationalities slip my mind. I find myself in these strange situations occasionally where I am translating 'english' to 'english' so others can understand one another with their varying accents. Saturday morning I took a trip to Kaapeli: The Cable Factory, "Finland's largest cultural centre". There are several ... read more

Moi! (Hi!) Mitä kuuluu? (How are you?) My first class - Survival Finnish 1 began today and I’m beginning to learn some basic phrases. Hopefully I won’t be as lazy with Finnish as I was with French because I’m still having trouble shopping at the grocery store and so I actually need to be able to understand a bit of Finnish (unlike French since everything at home is bilingual). I had a great weekend exploring Helsinki! 17 of us international students took the train down on Friday afternoon and stayed in a hostel that is part of the Olympic Stadium near the city-centre of Helsinki. Helsinki hosted the Summer Olympics in 1952 and a section of the stadium is now a very nice hostel. The walk from the hostel to the city-centre is about 20 minutes ... read more

So it’s now Monday - and it took me about 3 days to send a first blog entry out there about me arriving here! I am only a day late for sending an update about the weekend. I guess I am catching up! Saturday - All I really wanted to do was to stay in my flat - but I ended up going out with my roommate, Sandra, and a friend of hers from Germany, Suzie. We really did not have an agenda - So it was a fun day of wandering around and finding out where we would end up. We walked down to the Senate Square and saw the Lutheran Cathedral. It’s a huge Church. We did not end up going inside of it - perhaps another day. From the Square, we walked down ... read more